Friedrich Herz Crafts Forms That Feel Like They Survived Something Scarred surfaces, lathed ghosts, and the beauty of the unfinished
Discarded tables become relics. Stove tiles whisper in fragments. Herz turns surface into signal—brutal, poetic, and unexpectedly alive.
There’s a sound that comes before language.
It’s the scrape of wood, the hollow ring of a found table leg, the burnt hiss of a stove tile.
Each work is a ceremony without instructions, a bruise with memor – About the Work - Friedrich Herz
That’s where Friedrich Herz begins.
His works don’t introduce themselves—they reveal themselves like bruises.
Friedrich Herz: (left) Alphabet for the blind Carved screen printing plate 39 x 36 cm - (right) Nfld Bx printed cardboard, mounted on multiplex 120x80cm - Permission and Courtesy of the Artist
You don’t just look at them. You trace them, you eavesdrop. The surfaces aren’t smooth. They resist. And in that resistance, something happens: memory, maybe. Or fiction dressed up as fact.
In Herz’s world, nothing is whole. A column might be made from chair legs and stair railings, but it doesn’t feel nostalgic—it feels hacked together like a myth half-remembered.
Friedrich Herz: A.K.A. Carved PVC wood imitation on Aluminium, 124 x 99 cm - Permission and courtesy of the Artist
There’s elegance, yes, but it’s got splinters. These aren’t sculptures that want to be admired. They want to be read, misread, and misunderstood—like architectural ghosts or ceremonial props from a culture that never existed.
His paintings aren’t paintings, at least not in the conventional sense. They’re extractions—rubbings, carvings, erasures.
Take the circular wall reliefs: what looks at first like decorative texture reveals itself as a kind of visual scar tissue. The surfaces have been worked over—scraped, gouged, engraved.
They carry the violence of their making. There’s beauty, but it’s not passive. It challenges you to look longer, and then look again.
And just when you think you’ve decoded a pattern—tile, woodgrain, fossil, map—it slips into something else. That’s the point. Herz is building visual systems that don’t want to be solved.
Friedrich Herz: Volcano Landscape 29 x 26 cm Acryl paint on T-Shirt mounted on cotton (right) You are the tree, I am the leave plywood, acrylic and spraypaint 45 x 31 cm Permission and Courtesy of the Artist
A carved stove plate suggests domesticity, but the mark-making feels ritualistic, almost volcanic.
In fact, volcanoes do show up—on a worn T-shirt glued to canvas, a souvenir gone sacred.
But these eruptions aren’t climactic. They’re quiet. They simmer. They feel held back.
There’s humor in the work too, but it’s dry and structural.
Like in the way he stacks antique furniture parts into totemic columns, letting them rise with an almost sarcastic grace.
The sculptures say: this could be a monument, but it isn’t. This could be functional, but it refuses. It’s art that plays along—until it doesn’t.
Friedrich Herz - Va jouer! Carved veneer, round table, plaster Ø 100cm Permission and courtesy of the artist
What makes Herz’s work hit is how physical it is. Nothing feels digitally distanced or overly theorized.
He doesn’t outsource the labor—he carves, scrapes, assembles. The gesture is always present.
You see the tool marks. You sense the time.
Friedrich Herz: The trouble of fact and fiction, 2024, Carved PVC on aluminium, 53 x 39 cm - Permission and Courtesy of the Artist
That human residue, combined with the strangeness of the forms, creates something rare in contemporary art: work that feels truly lived in, even before you encounter it.
And yet, nothing screams for attention. The pieces don’t demand—they persist. They haunt.
Friedrich Herz: [Searching the abstract], Collage, aquarelle and ink on glass, framed 50x40 cm 2. Fine art print on Hahnemühlen Papier, 2020 Kiez,Kneipe,Widerstand Fotografie, 41 x 31cm | Permission and Courtesy of the Artist
They carry the stillness of objects that have waited a long time to be seen again. Or maybe to be misunderstood one more time, in a new way.
Friedrich Herz doesn’t chase clarity or spectacle. He offers sediment. He offers friction.
He builds with what’s been thrown out and lets those surfaces speak—quietly, slowly, with all their damage intact.
In a scene obsessed with smoothness and speed, that kind of rough patience feels radical.
And unforgettable!
Text by Anna
Official Website Friedrich Herz
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Friedrich Herz is founder of The Gimp - Project Space Berlin
Dominique Catherina Foertig
Friedrich Herz is part of our monthly new faces in contemporary art project - Selected by Erik Sommer
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